The dark sky casts an ominous haze over a demonstration in Ferguson, Mo. Protesters congregate in front of a firehouse. In the foreground a man stands guard, his back to the camera, a metal baton in one hand, multiple handcuffs dangling from the other.

The tense image by Sheila Pree Bright evokes civil rights photographs of the past. But the clothes and hairstyles mark it as contemporary, taken at a 2015 demonstration against police brutality and the killing a year earlier of Michael Brown, a black teenager.

The past often resonates in Ms. Bright’s photographs, which are collected in a new book, “#1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests” (Chronicle Books). Committed to documenting recent activism through the lens of history, she reminds us that the struggle for racial equality and justice in the United States has been longstanding and ongoing. The book includes portraits of past and present activists, photographs of Black Lives Matter demonstrations and meetings, and texts by Ms. Bright, Alicia Garza, Deborah Willis, Kiche Griffin, Aaron Bryant and Keith Miller.

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2015, National March on Ferguson, “We Can’t Stop Now,” protesting police violence and the murder of Mike BrownCreditSheila Pree Bright

Ms. Bright said the inspiration for “#1960Now” was the 2012 fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, an event that sparked the Black Lives Matter Movement. “I was unwilling to sit on the sidelines,” she wrote in an email. “I took a stand documenting the tensions, conflicts, and responses between communities and police departments which have resulted from police shootings in Atlanta, Ferguson, Baltimore and Baton Rouge. I’ve observed young social activists taking a stand against continued injustice that closely resembles what their parents and grandparents endured during the era of Jim Crow.”

In her work, Ms. Bright focuses not only on movement leaders, but also on the thousands of grass-roots activists on the front lines of protest. She is likewise committed to representing people historically overlooked in mainstream depictions of black political action, including mothers, women, and LGBT activists. “Bright’s work challenges what we see and how we see it,” wrote Mr. Miller. “Within the current context of momentous changes that surround us, her work refreshes our sense of the possible and expands our notions of what is beautiful.”

Ms. Bright’s photographs offer an intimate and humanistic view of black protest: a demonstrator staring mournfully into the camera, a tear running down his cheek; a somber activist, his mouth covered by tape inscribed with the name of Freddie Gray, the 25-year old African-American man killed while being transported by police in Baltimore; a marcher in rapt attention, his eyes closed, his hands clapping as if almost in prayer; and a moving juxtaposition of portraits — the artist Bree Newsome, who took down the Confederate Flag at the South Carolina Capitol in 2015, and Roslyn Pope, a member of the 1960s Atlanta Student Movement.

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Dr. Roslyn Pope, left, author of “An Appeal for Human Rights” at Spelman College in the 1960s, and Bree Newsom, right, activist, artist and poet, who took down the Confederate flag at South Carolina State Capitol.CreditSheila Pree Bright

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Devin Allen, left, activist and photographer whose image of the uprising in Baltimore graced the cover of Time magazine, and Robert Houston, civil rights photographer for the Poor People’s Campaign led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s.CreditSheila Pree Bright

The historical connections in “#1960Now” affirm that the fight for civil rights has taken many forms beyond the modern movement, thecampaign from the early 1950s through the late 1960s to secure legal rights for black Americans. “The search for racial equality is like a perpetual revolution never ending,” Ms. Bright wrote. “The struggles that continue now have taken on different shapes and forms throughout each generation.”

The fight has progressed through such disparate movements and events as the abolitionism of the 19th century, the birth of the African-American press in the early 20th century, the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the civil rights demonstrations of the 1950s, the Black is Beautiful movement of the 1960s and Black Lives Matter today. Despite different motivations and strategies, all belong to a shared legacy of African-American resistance to prejudice, white supremacy and oppression.

“The movements of now are faced with the same and worsening challenges that organizers and activists encountered in the 1960s — substandard conditions in Black communities, a lack of political power, and an amnesia that says that Black suffering is a product of our imagination rather than our lived experiences” wrote Ms. Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network.

Implicit in “#1960Now” is another common historical thread: the role of photography itself in recording historic events, motivating political action, and empowering African Americans. That several of Ms. Bright’s portraits are of photographers — Robert Houston, who documented the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., for example, or Devin Allen, whose dramatic image of the Baltimore Uprising was published on the cover of Time in May 2015 — speaks to the importance of the medium to the struggle.

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2015, Justice League NYC’s “March 2 Justice” from New York to Washington, D.C., in protest of police brutalityCreditSheila Pree Bright

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2015, Justice League NYC’s “March 2 Justice” from New York to Washington, D.C., in protest of police brutalityCreditSheila Pree Bright

By embracing the lush black-and-white aesthetic of legendary civil rights photographs, Ms. Bright underscores this historical continuity. While millions of cellphone photos are generated each day — some forceful testaments to racial violence and injustice — few possess the grace and quiet lyricism of her images.

Ms. Bright hopes that her pictures will broaden our understanding of today’s struggle for racial equality and justice, and the history that inspired it. She is heartened, too, by the conversations her photographs have generated about race, prejudice, police brutality, and social justice in the United States.

“I see my role as photographic artist as the messenger to bring about awareness,” she wrote. “Photography has always brought awareness about racial injustices that exist in this country. However, there are questions that weigh heavily on my mind: Have we learned from the past? And who are we as a country?”

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2016, “Shut Down the DNC,” Black Resistance March Against Police Terrorism & State RepressionCreditSheila Pree Bright

Race Stories is a continuing exploration of the relationship between race and photographic depictions of race by Maurice Berger. He is a research professor and chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.